Atlantic Avenue between the East River and Flatbush Avenue should be the grand boulevard of brownstone Brooklyn. Alas, Atlantic Avenue, in its architectural manginess, lacks charm. It doesn’t lack interest. And it stands on the precipice of enormous changes.

A country road called District Street demarcated the southern boundary of the Village of Brooklyn, established within the historic Town of Brooklyn in 1816, and later incorporated in the 1834 City of Brooklyn. The new city ranged south of Atlantic as far as Sunset Park, where it abutted the Town of New Utrecht. That is why Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, and Sunset Park were known as “South Brooklyn.” In 1855 District Street became Atlantic Street. At the northwest corner of Atlantic and Hicks streets, look at the Heights Deli-Grocery. The words “Atlantic Street” are inscribed on the wall. This tells us the building went up after 1855 but before the 1870s, when Atlantic Street became Atlantic Avenue.

Steam ferries operated between the foot of Atlantic and Manhattan’s Whitehall Street from 1836 to 1933. In 1836 the Brooklyn & Jamaica Railroad began operating trains from the ferry to the Town of Jamaica along an Atlantic Avenue right-of-way. In 1844, to even out the incline and ease the passage of steam locomotives, the railroad built a cut-and-cover tunnel between Columbia Street and Boerum Place. The tunnel ceased functioning in 1860. In 1980 a young engineer and student of old maps named Robert Diamond got permission to explore the tunnel, and still organizes occasional tours of it.

The Arab restaurants and stores of the western part of the avenue date from the 1930s and 1940s. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel displaced many Arabs from Manhattan’s lower West Side in the 1940s, including the proprietors of Sahadi’s, the famous gustatory emporium, which had been on Manhattan’s Washington Street since 1895 but came to Atlantic between Court and Clinton in 1948. These were Arab Christians of the pre-1924 immigrant era.

Nearer the Flatbush end, the Arab stores are Muslim, from the post-1965 immigrant era. Here are the mosques and Halal markets.

Between the Arab sectors we find an increasingly yuppified Atlantic, typified by the swanky new apartment house rising at Court Street on the site of a much-loathed municipal parking lot. We find architectural distinction in a number of outstanding Victorian storefronts, some belonging to the antique stores that still predominate in sections of the avenue, with slender wooden columns and great plate-glass windows of 19th century vintage.

Between Smith Street (turn south for restaurant row) and Boerum Place is the 1956 Men’s House of Detention. Penal reformers wished that such structures resemble middle-class apartment houses. Nicknamed the “Brooklyn Hilton,” we’d have had some confusion if the Brooklyn downtown Marriott had been, as was originally planned, a Hilton. Today, the House of Detention is closed. Such has been our crime drop that the outer-borough houses of detention are, at least for now, no longer needed.

Finally, at the eastern end, we enter “Ratnerville.” If the vast Atlantic Yards development goes forward, Atlantic Avenue will change in dramatic ways – but will it be the lovely boulevard we all hope it may yet become?